At least 100 Congolese were killed over the weekend in an attack by rival tribal fighters on a fishing village on the Democratic Republic of Congo-Uganda border, a senior Ugandan military commander said on Monday.
Brigadier Kale Kaihura, who commanded some 6 000 Ugandan troops in the DRC until their withdrawal early last month, said on Saturday that Lendu tribal fighters armed with machetes and rifles attacked Chomia village north of the Lake Albert port of Kasenyi, killing at least 100 members of the Hema tribe, including women and children.
He said dozens of others were wounded, and some were ferried across the lake for treatment in Ugandan hospitals.
Speaking from the Ugandan border, Kaihura said many of the Hema living in the area 48 kilometres northeast of Bunia, the provincial capital where more than 400 people have been killed in tribal clashes in the past month, had already fled to Uganda.
”But these people had refused to leave. They were prominent, well-known Hema figures, and they thought they would not be killed,” he said.
Kaihura dismissed as ”exaggerations” claims by several Hema leaders that 253 people had been massacred.
But speaking in Bunia, Kitembo Bitamara, a member of Pusic, a faction of the Hema fighters based in Chomia, said the hundreds of Lendu attackers were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades as well as the more traditional machetes and rifles.
He said this indicated weapons had been supplied by the DRC army, which has begun to send troops into the volatile Ituri region that is nominally controlled by rebels backed by both Uganda and Rwanda.
Both countries sent troops into the DRC in August 1998 to back rebels seeking to oust then-President Laurent Kabila, whom they accused of undermining their security. The DRC, Africa’s third-largest nation, was roughly divided in two by a 1999 ceasefire, with the rebels holding the north and the east.
Since then, most of the fighting has stopped, except in the resource-rich east where a confusing array of rebels and tribal militia — each with their own DRC, Rwandan or Ugandan backers — fight for control of territory containing gold, coltan and valuable tropical hardwood. The latest rumors circulating talk of
vast deposits of oil as well.
The United Nations sent a 3 500-member mission to the DRC to monitor the ceasefire, but its mandate is only to protect unarmed military observers and UN installations. Two of its observers were captured, tortured and killed last month by unidentified tribal fighters.
In Bunia, tribal fighters are stepping up attacks and threats on DRC citizens working for international aid agencies, a UN representative said on Monday. Employees of Medair, a Swiss relief group, Red Cross workers and several temporary UN staff have been beaten or received death threats.
”The security situation in Bunia is not that stable,” Madnodje Mounoubai said. ”There is a pattern of humanitarian workers being attacked.”
Last week the Security Council authorized the deployment of an emergency French-led international force of 1 400 to Bunia under a so-called ”chapter 7” mandate that allows them to shoot to kill.
Kaihura recalled that he had warned of a security vacuum after his troops withdrew from Ituri under international pressure and in accordance with a separate peace deal with the DRC.
A national transitional government for the DRC was to have been inaugurated last week under a power-sharing agreement among rebels and President Joseph Kabila, Laurent’s son, but one of the rebel groups balked at the last minute over control of key army posts. – Sapa-AP